Squealers and Dealers (Updated: Trump Redefines Slime for the Ages)

Michael Cohen, longtime friend and legal fixer for the world’s most famous slime ball, has testified before the House of Representatives that his former boss was — shockingly — a slime ball.

The Trump cult’s defense of their slime ball against Cohen’s testimony — and I include a lot of elected Republicans among the cultists at this point — is that Cohen is a lifelong well-known big fat liar who is willing to lie about anything and merely says whatever he has to say to advance his own petty interests.

Let’s grant all that. After all, the reason everyone so easily accepts this as true of Cohen is that everyone knows Trump employed him for years for exactly this purpose: To be a big fat liar who would be willing to lie about anything and say whatever he had to say to advance his and his boss’s own petty interests.

Thus, every bit of unscrupulous, lying lack of integrity that anyone pins on Cohen — accurately — also sticks on the man who made Cohen, his most important longtime employer and exploiter. Cohen’s dishonor, dishonesty, and untrustworthiness are his identity, and this identity tells us all we need to know about the man whose loyal appendage and amoral agent Cohen was for the twelve years leading up to the 2016 election.

Trump, as he frequently boasted during his presidential campaign, only hires the best people. “Best at what?” we might have asked. Then again, those of us who had not lost our heads in an orange cloud already knew what they were best at, since we knew what Trump himself was best at.

Speaking of Trump’s bests, his best friend of the moment, Kim Jong-un, apparently failed to provide as wonderful a deal at their second summit as he offered Trump at their first. At the first summit in Singapore last year, Kim generously offered to let Trump aggrandize and legitimize the world’s most outrageous death cult dictator, and furthermore to let Trump promise to run away from East Asia with his tail between his legs in exchange for Kim’s vague promissory note on maybe someday beginning to dismantle a few obsolete parts of the North Korean nuclear program.

Naturally, that was an offer Trump just couldn’t refuse — much as he couldn’t say no to Congressional Democrats’ offer to give him a worse border security bill than the ones he scoffed at three months earlier.

The problem with this second summit, held, appropriately, at the site of America’s most humiliating defeat — in a war Trump avoided with medical deferments and then later used as a metaphor for his struggles to avoid getting venereal diseases from his many lowlife girlfriends — is that Trump had already “won” so much at their first meeting that Kim had little left to demand from him…er, I mean “offer” him. This time, it seemed the only thing left to do was actually promise to dismantle some of his actual nuclear program, which naturally Kim is unwilling to do. So Trump, with nothing new to surrender to his new dear friend, decided to leave early.

His cultists will tout his courage in walking away, as though this were the second coming of Ronald Reagan at Reykjavik. The differences between the two situations, however, are, needless to say, both many and essential.

First, Reagan was negotiating for the survival of the civilized world against the second most powerful nation on Earth, and the gravest threat to liberty the modern era had yet known. Trump is playing footsie with a clever little punk who deserves to be laughed out of the room, but whom Trump instead insists on legitimizing and praising as a great leader and a friend with whom he has a wonderful relationship.

Reagan had nerves of steel, and proved it at Reykjavik in the face of Gorbachev’s vast array of nuclear warheads targeting all the major cities of America and Europe. Trump is a cowardly little beta, conceding the ranch to North Korea because he is scared to death of Kim’s one test missile that might have had the range, but probably not the aim, to reach Guam.

Reagan’s meeting with Gorbachev was for all the marbles, and the world was on pins and needles during that time of global crisis. Trump’s second summit with Kim has felt all along like an even less justifiable publicity stunt than the first. Just yesterday, a high-ranking South Korean government official remarked to the press that the deal on the table this time was bad for the U.S., a clear signal that the fate of this little photo opportunity was already all but sealed as a failure.

So on this auspicious day of shame, even by Trump standards, we have Trump being described in Congress as the lowest of self-seekers, by a man who was actually the facilitator of his lowest self-seeking for many years; and we have Trump wasting everyone’s time and hopes on a fake summit with a thug who does not deserve to be in the same room with an American president, and for which clearly no proper preparations were made, and no advance negotiating done, because this second summit had no other intention but to distract everyone by reliving the ignominy that Trump and his cult of dependent children regard as perhaps the greatest triumph of his presidency to date, namely his propping up of, and moral weakness before, a lunatic dictatorship that was allowed to develop nuclear weapons by previous American presidents, and is now being allowed to become a respected global leader in good standing — in sheer cowardice before those nukes — by this president.

Trump now says he didn’t mind walking away from this non-summit — which was clearly nothing but a staged “walk away” performance from the get-go — because “speed is not important.” He’s in no rush to get a deal.

Oh, really? But wasn’t this whole negotiation process begun last year under the auspices of a last-minute frantic attempt to save the world from World War III? Now it turns out — much like the national emergency Trump recently declared at the U.S.-Mexico border — that there is no emergency. And while Trump patiently waits for his “right deal,” the clever little punk who is playing the President of the United States for the fool that he is continues to buy time, develop his nuclear program, and love all the great champagne and fine foreign food he is getting from people who used to mock him as a ridiculous little punk trying to play with the big boys. Suddenly, thanks to Trump’s cowardice, Kim is a big boy.

But there’s no rush, says Trump today. Why? Because Trump is a perfect instantiation of Hobbes’ description of man in the state of nature. He is moved entirely by fear and vainglory, alternating daily between the two. He is scared to death of any real or perceived challenge, and yet desperate to aggrandize himself as a brave hero where the stakes are not too high. The problem is that the real stakes will indeed get higher, as Trump preens in prime time, in almost perfect ignorance of what is really happening around him.

“Sleep well tonight,” as the slime ball soothed his cult after the first summit. Daddy will protect you from all the big bad wolves — by handing them all the meat they demand so they never get angry.

UPDATE:

Michael Cohen has neither the moral sense nor the vocabulary to describe how low a form of scum Donald Trump really is. Need proof?

President Donald Trump says he doesn’t think North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was involved in the mistreatment of American college student Otto Warmbier, who died after being detained in the North.

Trump says of Kim: “He tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word.”

And here, if you are curious to see what those things living at the bottom of the dumpster in the back alley look and sound like, is a video clip of the most servile and ignoble man currently occupying any seat of “power” on this planet.

President Trump on Otto Warmbier: “I really believe something very bad happened to him, and I don’t think that the top leadership knew about it…(Kim Jong-Un) felt very badly about it…He tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word.” pic.twitter.com/EWnw7BzVNe

Rick Santorum correctly defines Trump’s slavering defense of Kim Jong-un as “reprehensible.” But I think that no description is ultimately useful that does not properly and loudly identify the motivation for Trump’s reprehensible behavior: He is a slavering coward — a perpetually frightened wee man.

What does that make the morons who worship him?

“Oh, I know, but I like a lot of his policies.” That’s wonderful. The world should die at the mercy of a lily-livered sissy’s instincts for self-preservation so you can have some cute tweets about global warming and a couple of slight modifications to the Obamacare rules.

CORRECTION AND APOLOGY:

The proprietor of Limbo wishes to apologize to lily-livered sissies for suggesting that Donald Trump was a high enough life form to qualify as one of them. Lily-livered sissies might hide behind dumpsters, but they don’t live and find their sustenance — friends, employees, girlfriends, etc. — at the bottom of them.